Writing With Feeling – Where is the Emotion?

I’m sure you’ve read books that, without quite knowing how it was done, brought memories, feelings and emotions you didn’t even know you had up to the surface to flood through you.  Books you’ve laughed with, cried with and even screamed in terror with.

They are not always the obvious books; the romantic weepy, the slasher horror story or the slapstick comedy.  They can be books about ordinary lives and the kind of people we might know. People going about their business; experiencing their daily small hurts and triumphs.

Written by authors who can make their words dance in a way that speaks straight to our hearts.

The best books let us learn something about ourselves. They illuminate parts of us we might not really want to look at; allow us to feel stuff, revisit old hurts and wounds safely in the world set out between the pages.  The tears we cry for our fictional friends are just as cathartic, the joys we share with them just as uplifting as those we feel for ourselves.  With books like these, when you turn the last page it’s like leaving home and saying goodbye.

So as writers how do we go about putting the emotion back into our writing?

I have to confess I am at the very beginning of this journey, so all I can do is share the thoughts and insights I have had and what brought me to the realisation that my writing needed more feeling, more raw life and a bit of true grit.

Writing the Aten Sequence books is fun.  It is a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek romp through science fantasy and Ancient Egypt.  So far the characters have faced some challenges, been in a bit of danger and had their petty disputes, but there’s been nothing too heavy. And let’s face it, there’s not a shred of evidence that our protagonist Aten even has a heart, let alone knows how to use it.

In the third book, which I’m currently revising and editing, this all changes.  Something happens which will have a major impact on the major characters; they will experience loss, suffer grief, regret and guilt.

Yet when I went through the chapter that would change everything for them and, hopefully the reader, it read with all the emotion of a recipe posted on a cooking blog.

The words are there, the facts are there; everything the reader needs to know about what happens and move the story along is there.  But the feeling isn’t there.  It’s as emotionally flat as a pancake!

So what have I done to help put the emotion into my writing?

 Exposure – as authors we might think we are writing solely for the benefit of our readers, but I believe the most talented authors know that they have to put themselves into their work.  They have to expose themselves.  Show who they are through the actions, feelings and thoughts of their characters.

Exposure is scary; letting people see who we really are and be honest about our feelings is hard for a lot of us.  But the only emotions we have access to are our own, so we need to use them when we are creating our characters and putting words into their mouths.  Especially, the darker, pettier, less glorious traits we possess. 

Exposure makes us feel vulnerable, but as an author I feel you have to accept you will feel a degree of vulnerability every time you send a manuscript out, every time you read your story out loud to an audience or ask a friend to critique it.  Letting myself feel vulnerable like this has been a hard one for me, as I used to hate anyone reading my writing.  But I’m having to work to get over it, or all I’ll ever have to show for my effort is a few yellowing manuscripts at the back of a drawer.

Practice – like everything you want to be good at, writing is about practice.  Just as nobody gets to be good at tennis by sitting on the sofa watching TV, your writing won’t improve unless you write.  Most experts recommend that if you are serious about your craft then you need to have the discipline to write every day.  To set aside some time and write, even if you only produce a couple of lines in the time allotted.

Intention – if, like me, you don’t think you are getting your readers to feel the range and depth of reaction and emotion you would like to call from them; take time and pay more attention to the words you choose and how you use them.  I tend to like to gallop on with the story, so miss opportunities to draw the reader in and give them the space to experience it all – to feel whatever it brings up for them.

It is also tempting to tell our readers what they should be thinking or feeling.  Avoid being too explicit with what your characters are experiencing.  The old ‘show not tell’ is just as pertinent when it come to emotion and allows the reader to create their own interpretation, come to their own conclusions.   If you tell your readers your hero Joe is heartbroken because his girlfriend left him, it is not likely to grip their imagination as much as if you painted a picture of his grief and sense of loss through his actions and dialogue.

So, taking my own advice on board, this week I have been practising!  I have been writing poetry, which is very unusual for me – love poetry no less!  It might not be very good poetry and probably wouldn’t win any competitions, but the aim was to write emotionally, to expose feelings, pain and hurt.

As an author you can never really know if you have achieved that; only a reader can tell you if you touched them with your words. It may take hundreds of thousands of these words to get it right, but if you are serious about being a writer you will keep on trying and will never give up.

 I Wish I Knew

Ribbons of thought unwind

Round kisses, words and time

When lying warm and drowsy

Sun creeping across your bed

Was all the paradise I needed

To banish the doubts from my head

From the night I first saw you

The casual glance you threw my way

When I saw in a stranger

A man to steal my heart away

The heart I left unguarded

A trust for which I’d have to pay

Didn’t know shadows could lengthen

Thought the sun would stay

Believed that in that patch of golden light

My dragons you would slay

So when I smiled and reached for you

I didn’t see you’d slipped away

For though your body lay warm beside me

In your head you’d gone

Galloped to a distant country

Where another conquest you won

I wish I’d seen, I wish I knew

That all I was, was the past to you

That even as you loved my body

My face you did not see

Patterns on the wallpaper more interesting than me

 I was a port of call, a pit stop along the way

A place to fuel and rest awhile

Till other interests lit your day

I tried to stay, I tried to pretend

Things had never changed

That the words you said still rang true; believed them all the same

But knowledge is a dangerous thing, so when I saw you smile

And look across the crowded room to catch a brand new gaze

I could hide no longer; from Eden turned away

Flash fiction – or How I Got with the Programme!

I suppose you could say I came to writing via a circuitous route.  I started the first Aten Sequence book a few months before I went travelling in 2007 around Australia, with all good intentions of having it finished by the time I returned. Well that never happened – too many beaches, kangaroos, outback trails, excellent restaurants and fun to be had!

On my return I discovered an American website called Hubpages and started writing articles and earning money online, so fiction writing was firmly on the back burner.  After several years, I turned back to my original project and the first two Aten Sequence books were completed and self-published

But like all things, if you are passionate about what you do, you want to learn, you want to improve, and want your writing to be the best it can be. So how to do it?  Of course, one of the best ways is to keep on writing, so I started writing short stories as well as starting on the third Aten book.  I also started reading everything I could on composing stories, structuring novels, marketing and how to get book reviews.

But the thing that always puzzled me was the amount of people who wrote flash fiction. Why?  What was the point of it?  Flash fiction, if you have never come across the term before, is a very short, complete story of under 500 words or so.  There is even micro fiction, which is generally accepted as a story of 300 words or less.  But if you have novels to write, why spend your precious time crafting these stories?

I finally learned the benefit of flash fiction and how I could use it to improve my writing skills when I joined a writers group.  Again this was something I had thought about for around three years before I plucked up the courage to attend one of the Monday night meetings, where regular flash fiction competitions are held. These stories have to be 300 words excluding the title and the theme is chosen by the group.

So how did starting to write flash fiction help to improve my writing?

·                   It made me start to consider every word I used and weigh up how important it was to the story.  Writing full length novels makes it very easy to fall into the trap of using too many words and indulging in long, rambling sentences.

·         If using adjectives and adverbs is the cardinal sin of writing, then flash fiction helps you eliminate them and forces you to find ways of conveying your meaning without using too many descriptive words.  If you have only got 300 to use, you want to make sure each one counts.

·         It helps bring clarity.  You have a story to tell, ideas to get across, points of view you want to share.  You have to get rid of all the waffling, rambling and going around the long way.  For a complete story you still need a beginning, middle and end, so you need to strip out all the unessential elements and get on with it.

·         This stripping out also means ditching characters, too much scene setting, and any dialogue that does not add to the plot.  The ‘KISS’ principle reigns supreme; to tell your story in so few words you have to keep it as simple as possible.

·         You need to wrap the story up with a decisive last line. It is too easy with so few words to leave a story hanging and not give your readers an ending that satisfies them.

·         Flash fiction poses a new challenge every time.  You are given a theme, a word count and you have to produce a piece of writing in set time period. Challenges can be scary but they push us out of our fur-lined writing ruts and test us to think differently about what we are doing and write on topics we would usually avoid at all costs.

.·        Writing flash fiction gives you the opportunity to have a long, hard look at the bad writing habits you have gotten into. What words do you habitually overuse? Do you have certain phrases or expressions that creep into every piece you write, whether they are appropriate or not?  In these very short stories, there is no place for your writing ‘comfort blankets’. They have to be discarded to crisp up your story and let it be told within the word limit.

I am no great expert in writing flash fiction and am relative newbie in producing these very short stories.  But I am already beginning to see the benefits and am starting to bring what I have learned to my longer projects.

So, if like me, you are sceptical about how writing flash fiction can help you develop as an author, why not give it a go?  There are competitions and sites online where you test out your skill or you can join a local writers group, where you will receive useful feedback and critiques.

Here is an example of flash fiction.  It is a story I wrote on the theme of 'beyond the gate' for the Watford Writers Group, which I am very proud to say won the third prize.  I hope you enjoy it.

The Darkest Hour

The shadows lengthened as the moon slipped behind the mountain.

Maren knew it was time to wake the American.  The wounded flyer would only get one chance and, if he didn’t get it right, they could both be dead by the time the sun rose.

He reached out and shook the sleeping man’s shoulder, shoving his other hand over his mouth to stop him calling out.

‘Time to go,’ he whispered. ‘The moon’s just set, so it’s as dark as it’s going to get. You need to keep low and make as little noise as possible.  I haven’t seen or heard one of their patrols in a couple of hours, but it doesn’t mean they’re not out there waiting for us to make a move.

Maren took the top off his water bottle and thrust it at the American, who took a few thirsty mouthfuls.

The young flyer gave the old Basque guide a grateful look as he handed back the bottle.

‘Won’t you come too?  Someone tipped the Nazis off, those patrols were waiting for us? It’s too dangerous to stay.’

Maren shook his head.

‘My family is here.  If I don’t go back I’m putting them all under suspicion.  Besides, Todor is only expecting one package.’

‘How can I thank you for what you’ve done for me?  You’ve risked so much?’

‘By not getting caught.  The Spanish border is over there by that stand of pine trees.  Get beyond the gate and you should be safe.’

At that moment a light flashed three times in the trees, the signal Maren had been waiting for.

‘You must go now,’ he said pushing the American out of the barn door, watching as he stumbled into the dying night to be swallowed by the darkness.

Flash Fiction - A Jolly Good Catch

This is a short story I wrote for a flash fiction competition at Watford Writers.    It was my first evening at the writing group and my first entry.  I was very proud my story was voted into second place.

A Jolly Good Catch

We’d always thought of Edmunds as a good catcher and usually we applauded him for it.

It was a good thing until that night.  A good chap to have fielding on the rutted, makeshift pitches we used for battalion cricket matches.  He could catch any ball that came at him, however fast. He’d always manage to wrap his fingers around it and throw it back in one rapid, seamless movement.

That night was bitterly cold.  There was an iron frost and the sky was full with the cold sparkle of stars.  The half moon threw shadows over No Man’s Land, turning shell holes into pits of stygian hell. Moonlight glinted off the rifles and bayonets of the dead, strewn like random, broken puppets across the frozen mud.

We huddled on the fire step waiting for a German raid. The frigid air carried every sound we made, so each cough, foot stamp and curse must have carried to the German lines.

All we could hear was crackling frost, distant shelling and a machine gun chattering down the line.  Every time a Very light briefly lit up the dark night we expected to see the raiding party creeping towards our wire.

We were so lost in our waiting that at first we paid little heed to the dark object that flew with a faint hissing noise over the parapet.

Edmunds, acting on his famous reflex, stuck out a hand and caught it.

‘Jolly good catch,’ cried one of the men as another Very light lit up the sky.

Edmunds looked down and seemed confused by what he’d caught.

‘Throw the bloody thing back over the wire.’ I screamed before scrambling to get as far away from him as possible.

But Edmunds didn’t move.  His usual faultless follow-through was gone.

The thing went off.  Ears ringing, I turned to see Edmunds explode into a human fire ball.  I saw his lips move, but could hear nothing over the roar of the flames.  His catch had probably saved us, but the price he paid was a hideous death by fire.